Scientists develop a tech to crush slow ‘peak time’ internet speeds

SLOW, PEAK TIME internet speeds – which sees data speeds drop by up to 30 percent due to rush hour traffic – could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new tech that enables dedicated data rates at more than 10,000 megabits-per-second (Mb/s).

Developed by a bunch of scientists at The University of Cambridge in the UK, the new technology is able to deliver a super-fast but low-cost broadband connections that are stale in speed via a simplified receiver that would be used in optical access networks. This refers to the links connecting Internet subscribers to their service providers.

The scientists said this was achieved by adopting a coding technique to fibre access networks that was designed originally to prevent signal fading.

The findings were published in Nature Communications and funded by the EPSRC UNLOC Programme and Huawei Technologies. The study explains how by maximising the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of light. The researchers said that in an ideal world, they’d dedicate a wavelength to each subscriber to avoid the bandwidth sharing between the users,

“By 2025, average speeds over 100 times faster will be required to meet increased demands for bandwidth-hungry applications such as ultra-high definition video, online gaming, and the Internet of Things,” said university researcher, Sezer Erkilinc.

The idea of having internet speeds of this calibre might not be a completely new discovery. It’s actually already possible using highly sensitive hardware known as coherent receivers. However, these are costly and only financially viable in core networks that link countries and cities. The new, simplified receiver retains many of the advantages of coherent receivers, but is simpler, cheaper, and smaller, requiring just a quarter of the detectors used in conventional receivers, the scientists said. µ